Couches are more comfortable than one would expect

Friday morning dumbo galleries

sound engineering with Nick and Jeff Cook

the gala for PS

St Lucia Drummer/mic set up

Short film in the living room

music video

I also reached out to Jessi Reaves and am going to her studio to help her this Friday! I’ll be sure to take some pictures for your slideshow. 

Today I’m going to an NYU special effects class to ask about some of the techniques my friend has been learning from her professor! She was working on some hyper-realistic silicone body parts that really impressed me. She couldn’t remember too much about what processes or materials she used, so she invited me to see for myself.

 At Volta’s fair, my favorite work was in the section curated by Mickalene Thomas and Racquel Chevremont. The highlights of the selected artists include Kennedy Yanko, who reclaimed metal scraps and mended and entangled them with ceramic and pigskin. Both Kennedy and her work had a strong, centered presence in any room. Other work I really enjoyed from the section was Christie Neptune, a photographer with lush portraiture possibly referencing value, function, and visibility. Lastly, Kameelah Janan Rasheed stood out with a large scale, black and white, xeroxed-based installation. Of the un-curated section, Jeremy Thomas’s refined car scarps, Cheryl Pope’s flocked antique miniatures, Sto Len’s marbled paper prints of polluted waterways, and Bruno Miguel’s colorful installations hit.

At the Armory sculpture by Michail Pirgelis, Gabriel Rico, and Nacho Carbonell and installations by Patrick Jacobs, Roxy Paine stuck out to me. Over all, I felt like the fair had a lot of work catering to viewer promotion on Instagram, with space for posing through mirrored pieces and exciting lighting.

After the fairs were done and I got back into gear with Letha, We begun installing in Grimm for her opening this Sunday. I came in Wednesday and Thursday because she let me reschedule for Volta’s break down on Monday. The art installers and gallery assistants at Grimm were great company to be around, and it was exciting to follow through with something I’ve been helping work towards for months now. At the gallery, we put together the large steel sculptures, hung concrete and vinyl sculptures, and pushed a c-print into the wall with an i-beam. Letha mentioned still having a few pieces she wants to work on in the studio once the show is up, and I can’t wait to learn the process.  She’s planning to work on pieces that involve a process I’ve yet to help her with, where she flips the concrete pieces as soon as they’re poured and hammers them to slop while they are setting. 

On Thursday I also finally made in to the New Museum Triennial.  Wilmer Wilson’s piece glistened, with suggestions of escapism under the common but sparkling staple. The KERNEL piece was visually juicy, though I was much more contextually interested in Cian Dayrit’s paintings and maps on the same floor. They referenced colonialism, political power, social classifications, propaganda and belief systems. I could begin to unpack more while exploring it, unlike some of the more minimal works.

Friday morning I applied for Frieze, submitted to Whurk Magazine, and wrote to a Richmond label, Crystal Pistol, about releasing my album. Friday night I went to two shows of the same building, at Soho 20 and The Border. The work at Soho 20 lacked mystery for me, but the Border was right up my alley, with more sculptural elements and material/process explorations. Soho 20 had work by Susan Hockaday, whose colorful, densely patterned photographs of beach plastic visually related to I-spy books. My favorite piece of the night was Peter Kaspar’s sculpture, using thin wood and fiberoptic wire to “explore the relationship between culture and memory”. For me, this work evoked the childhood memory of putting my finger to the top of a flashlight and watching it glow red in wonder. Not often is technically advanced work so playful and inviting. To activate the light in the piece, the viewer had to move a little rock to the center of a wooden box, like magic.

I need to get my energy cleansed by a professional or spirit. Suggestions are welcome. 

carpet weights on stairs

carpet made of construction safety fencing

design of a circuit board in mirror, mazing the floor of a room

peeling the backs of mirror so a textured haze of transparent windows to inverted vinyl text, a light box.

I texted my grandpa. He’s been retired since January, and stripping the plastic off of old Christmas lights. He was going to sell them for their weight to a scrap shop, but I’m buying the weight instead for my chandeliers.

This past weekend I saw Peter Pan Jr, featuring my 13 year old cousins in Pennsylvania. My Uncle kept bragging about me working for a theatre company in New York and everyone else kept saying I looked like any one of my little ones. I want them to be happy. I hope to have free time soon to go visit them and spend a day with each one. 12/13 years ago I couldn’t be seen without them and at various points in my life they’ve been my main reason to keep going. A friend of mine once said to give yourself the advice you would tell your 8 year-old self. I have three girls who give me a lot more advice than I could give them, as much as I try. I don’t want them to grow up ashamed of their bodies. Its an easy thing to do in my family, where the young ones are commented on regularly. I don’t want them to grow up serving too much, or trying to be a part of something exclusive.

On Sunday I went back to MoMA and saw Tarsila do Aramal. Her large figures reminded me of gardens of overgrown cucumbers. She is posed as the most notable Brazilian modernism in the 1920s, with flavors of folk art throughout her work. She was married to a writer, who often wrote fictions inspired from her work. Later in her career Marxism begins to play a part in her paintings, showing faces of dozens of factories workers under pollution, and prior her work was explicitly desegregated, in a time of racial change for Brazil. This is particularly notable as she was born to plantation owners 2 years before slavery was abolished in Brazil. 

Tomorrow I am seeing the show at the Rubin Museum called The Future is Fluid with an intern from PS who goes to the New School as a graduate in Art Entrepreneurism, with an undergraduate at Temple for music composition. I have really high hopes for the exhibit.

Monday: online sociology class day. Thats all I did aside from a long walk I took, where I found free plexiglass that I harvested for a potted cactus I am cherishing

Tuesday and Wednesday I went to PS. Tuesday we packed up a a truck with 9 4x4 cushions and unloaded them at MoMA PS 1! It was funny to be back and cool to see the underside of the museum! in the basement they have a glorious wood shop called fun-foo(?). I got some quality truck time with a co-worker Andy who offered me a job connection to Ralph Lauren this summer, so if I get it I might be staying in the city a bit longer! hopefully not the whole summer, so I can re-situate my self in my job and home in Richmond. Wednesday I also went to the opening of an art book store of art books from Dubai called Fully Booked. 

Saturday February 17th

Bring a bag lunch!

11AM

Meet at Sculpture Center at 11 am

Sculpture Center 44-19 Purves Street

Carissa Rodriguez

In Practice

12-2 PM

MOMA PS 1. 12-6

Carolee Schneemann “Kinetic Painting”

Cathy Wilkes

Michael E Smith

2:30 PM. Midtown Galleries

Amy Sillman Barbara Gladstone 130 East 64th

Allan Kaprow Hauser and Wirth 32 East 69th

Nicole Eisenman  Anton Kern  16 East 55th Street

4 PM

Met Bruer

Leon Golub  Raw Nerve

5PM

Walter De Maria Earth Room 141 Wooster Street

Wednesday–Sunday, 12–6 pm (closed from 3–3:30 pm)

Sunday January 28th-DIA BEACON. Open 11-4pm

DIA BEACON on Sunday. We would leave from Grand Central Station at 9:43 AM and get back around 6 PM.

9:15. Meet at Grand Central Station

9:43 Train leaves Grand Central Station

11:16 Arrive in Hudson and walk to Beacon

12:30 pm head down to Main Street for Quick Lunch

2-3pm Organized tour of DIA Beacon

4:52 PM. Leave Beacon

I then went to Roulette to see Nick Hallett and Daisy Press perform an opera. The light show was inspiring and their voices were breathtaking. After them a solo laptop noice performer, Rachika performed a set that almost brought me to tears three times. Something about noise consumes and loses you more than therapy could hope. I met a new friend, Eames, who invited me to a noise show with JamesK, RAFiA, and Nightspace. Everyone was basically in costume of the most performative version of themselves, art students, drop outs, and older. I met a painter from Parsons who thought of himself as like Picaso, and a FIT designer who dropped out against the industry. Eames is a visual artist who is actually based in DC when she’s not here! I plan to keep in touch with her, she makes amazing paintings and works for Issues Project Room. 

I also went to the Guggenheim for the first time; it was absolutely breath-taking. I imagine Moisés getting to walk up and down that spiral every day, wondering if it will ever lose it’s effect. I saw work by Danh Vo, who works with and against history in his sculptures. He is a collector, sculptor, deconstructor, and iconoclast. One of my favorite pieces was velvet wall hangings from the Vatican Museums with perfectly symmetrical settings from the museum burnt out from light exposure. In graphite text, a font you can’t read unless you see the piece’s title, envisioning the unseeable Promise Land, as a queer Vietnamese refugee. He takes apart collector items that would otherwise me capitalized despite their morally questionable value, and reclaims them, breathing life into otherwise mundane objects. He questions the value of mundane objects, that were symbolic of assimilation and western success to his grandmother, in the piece “Oma Totem,” stacking a specifically branded washing machine, fridge, TV, and crucifix.

Thursday I went in to strike a stage and set up a new on at PSNY for Avant-gardepaluza, a day long festival of three minute performances, taking place next Saturday. After work I found the apple store who told me I would have to get a new phone, which I am not able to do with them at the moment. They also wiped my laptop so it would be high functioning again, which was a much needed fix with my phone out of commission. I then went to get some work done in the closest coffee shop, and happened to be bombarded with strangers for 3 hours. I entertain more than I should trying to be friendly and kind. I met a rapper/fashion designer who seemed to want to both use me as a connection and let me know my place as someone who should speak less, then a immigrant from Hong Kong who wanted to analyze my handwriting. He was kind but distracting. I almost found a new housing option online but it was swiped by a less skeptical Facebook sublet-group member.